is dead!" The news was not kept from us children. Yet I remember, too,
that beyond the first sorrow and shock of such news lay a pardonable
pride. He had loved our home; he had found comfort and rest of spirit
there. I could still see his gray eyes looking into the firelight,
and the bend of his gracious body, every inch of him a poet. There,
with us, he had dared to be his best and had shared his gifts; his
personality had lighted up those very rooms and his voice had sounded
in them there where still my daily lot was cast. He had been our
guest--to me the most memorable of them all. And now he was gone.
Where? A kind of glory followed the thought. He was gone down over the
rim of the horizon of life to the land of Death, as splendid there as
here. We had lost him, whereas he, you see, had only lost us. It was
our lives that were darkened, not his. It was on our lives, not on his,
that the night fell. So he also, having been as a "morning star among
the living," now, having died, was
... as Hesperus giving
New splendor to the dead.
II
KITH AND KIN
So far, in mentioning the many guests who frequented the old home of
my childhood, I have named only such as were relations of the spirit.
Often these seemed to me more truly my kindred than those whose
kinship was based upon ties of blood. Yet, as my memory brings before
me those men and women of my mother's and father's families, I find
myself aware that the bonds of blood are strong, strong.
These came bearing valid claim of right and title; these were not
to be gainsaid or denied; these were accompanied by silent, but how
indisputable, witnesses of feature and form. Whether I liked them or
not, these were "my own."
But their chief power over me lay in this--that they linked my life
openly to all that of the past which I could call mine. The older of
them, who sometimes laid their hands on my head, touched with the other
hand, as it were, the generation already gone. They still carried vivid
memories of the dead in their hearts; spoke familiar words of them;
or, perhaps, wore delicate pictures of them still in lockets at their
throats. The invisible past was theirs visibly.
The Greeks, that people of sound ideals and of incomparable taste for
living, did not consent to or admit of the departure of the older
generation. To the invisible hands of the _lares_ and _penates_ was
delivered the sacredness of the house itself. The spirits of the
"departed" commemorated its lintels, kept clean and bright the fires
of the hearth, guarded the home from evil if so might be, and gathered
into a sweet influence those traits and characteristics and deeds long
gone in the flesh and surviving in the spirit in some fine aroma of
living.
It was, I believe, somewhat in the manner of the _lares familiares_
that the clan of our older "blood-kin," both those of a past and those
of a very nearly past generation, added meaning to that old home of my
childhood.
My great-aunts and great-uncles brought with them the spirits of
ancestors, were, in a sense, abodes of ancestors themselves. An older
generation looked out of their eyes; the spirits of men and women long
gone still lingered with them. It lent a dignity to life.
We children stood aside while they passed by in front of us. We saw
them served at table and elsewhere to the best of everything. To them,
too, as to the _lares_, were given the first and best portions of
viands. We listened to them as though to oracles speaking. It was for
us to allow the rivers of their broader wisdom to flow undisturbed by
that kind of stone-throwing, pebble-skipping curiosity so noticeable in
the average liberated child of to-day. Into their fine flowing streams
of narrative we flung no big or little stones of our questions or our
egotism. Their talk rippled on or flowed stately.
"We were under full canvas,"--I can see the fine-featured old gentleman
yet,--"we were in a zone of tempests, sailing round the Horn"--a wave
of the hand here, and a pause.
What is "full canvas"? What is a "zone"? What is "Horn"? Indeed, we
did not know. Be sure we did not interrupt the narrator to ask--not
more than the audience arrests the ghost in "Hamlet" for exact
definitions when it mouths out the sorrowful hollow words, "unhouseled,
disappointed, unaneled."
The words defined themselves well enough for all practical and
spiritual purposes. The mere sound of them was much, and the manner
of saying them was much more. We got no definitions of "full canvas,"
"zone," or "Horn," for future reference; but what we did get was
a present sense of some of the great allied human experiences--the
unpitying power of the sea, the dread of a soul brought face to face
with shipwreck and death, the quick awful moving of the "imminent hand
of God," the cry of a coward, the fierce bravery of a brave man ready
to fling life away for the sake of his fellows; then, the sense of a
great deliverance and what we take to be the mercy of God. And beyond
all these, for good measure, pressed down and running over, we had
added unto us additional respect for those older and more experienced
than ourselves, and the sense of a fine tale told tellingly.
But I would not have you suppose that I found all the old ladies and
all the old gentlemen delightful. Some of them I disliked and wished
gone. A sense of justice compels me to believe, however,--putting
aside all question as to whether they charmed or disappointed us, and
considering them only as purely educative mediums,--that these visitors
of an older generation are not surpassed, indeed, are rarely equaled,
by any theory or practice of modern pedagogy.
If Miss Lou Brooks and Eugene Ashton and Dr. Highway taught us much of
foreign lands and strange worlds and spiritual astronomies; if they
instructed me besides in the poetry and romance of life, these others
gave me a knowledge and love and understanding of other times, other
manners; they were a kind of incarnate treatises in history and ethics,
philosophy, and comparative philology.
What a lesson in history and manners was my great-aunt Sarah for
instance!
She was tall and stately, a kind of reproof to the shallowness of later
days. There was about her the refinement and delicacy of a rare old
vase. She had been young once; this my reason told me, for, in her
home, a large stone house called "Scarlet Oaks," hung a very beautiful
portrait of her, a delicate, very young, translucent face, rising above
the shimmering satin of a low-cut wedding gown. But for this I should
have taken her to have been always old, in the sense, I mean, in which
the piping forms of youth, the "brede of marble men and maidens,"
on Keats's Grecian urn are "forever young, forever fair." There was
such a finality and finish about her, like something arrested in its
perfection; such achievement, such delicate completeness, it seemed,
as could not change! It appeared that, when old age should waste our
own generation, that delicate loveliness of her would remain untouched.
She seemed already to live above, to survive, what was perishable and
trivial in her own day and ours.
She affected cashmere shawls and cameos, and wore long and very
elaborate mitts, and was always spoken of as "delicate." "Aunt Sarah is
very delicate." That, indeed, she was!
We all waited upon my aunt Sarah, from the greatest to the least. She
was very fond of my father, and to hear her address him as "William,"
and treat him with the condescension one gives to a child,--he who
had iron-gray hair,--and to see his eager and affectionate and wholly
respectful response, was to see time flow back.
My great-aunt had two brothers, my uncle Hays and my uncle William, who
still wore great pointed collars, and black stocks that wound around
the throat several times, and broadcloth coats. But my great-uncles,
unlike my great-aunt, seemed passing by. There was in their somewhat
careful, sometimes feeble step a suggestion of treaty and capitulation,
and from time to time, in their glance or actions, the pathos of
childlikeness so much more frequent in the old of that sex than of the
other.
Such types were rare, even in my day. There were only a few, a very
few such men and women left then, guests of a twice older generation,
visiting still, with a kind of retained graciousness, in the house of
life from which they were soon finally to depart. By an enviable fate
some six or eight of these men and women belonged to me. An air of
grandeur came to the house with them as with the coming of the gods
and goddesses in the old days; the human dwellings expanded, and the
lintels grew tall.
You can guess, perhaps, whether we children ventured a word! Glory
enough to be permitted to come as silent as mice to supper, while they
were there!
Yet I would not be misleading. Even those of a twice older generation
were by no means inevitably stately and imposing. History is not
given over entirely to kings and queens. There was, for instance,
my great-aunt Henrietta, of the "other side of the house." She was a
wholly different type. She was little. She wore three puffs at either
side of her face. These were held in place by little gray combs. She
knew everybody's affairs, and her chief delight was in recounting them.
She was a living chronicle, an accurate, if inglorious, historian;
an intimate and personal account, with a mind for little happenings
and a prodigious memory for events; a sort of Pepys in petticoats and
neckerchief.
She was the oldest survivor of my mother's people. The family tree
was in her keeping. But she cared little enough to dig about its deep
roots. She took no delight, apparently in the dignity of its stem, or
pride in the wide spread of its branches. Her entire pleasure, rather,
was in the twittering and whispering of its leaves. There was something
bird-like and flitting in her character, and she gossiped like a
chaffinch.
In her flowed together the great strains on my mother's side, Spencer
and Halsted, names to conjure with. She had, certainly, not less to be
stately about than my great-aunt Sarah. She had plenty of ancestors
to be proud of, and for a touch of romance, had danced the minuet
with Lafayette, when she was a slip of a girl and he a guest in her
grandfather's house; but she never appeared in the least proud of her
people, only unfailingly entertained by them.
It was at an early age that I resolved to model my life after my aunt
Sarah rather than after my aunt Henrietta; yet recalling my aunt
Henrietta's memorable characteristics, and that about Lafayette, and
the delightful side-puffs, and her searching comments on humanity,
I am willing to admit that she was perhaps the more vivid lesson of
the two. And if one counts the lasting distaste for gossip which I
acquired by being obliged to listen respectfully, hours at a time, it
seemed, while she continued to profess her little astonishments and
"you-don't-say-so's!" to my mother, with the best end of her sentences
always finished, inaudible to me, behind her fan, I am even prone to
believe her to have been the more influential and educative of the two.
In those days, those days when visits were long and frequent, the
bond of kinship was firmly established, and family characteristics
were strong and vivid. These were _Halsteds_, _Spencers_, _Hamiltons_,
_Ogdens_, _Portors_, and not to be mistaken, any more than you mistake
now your reader for your speller, your history for your geography.
It seemed, it is true, that they were there but to visit; but how much
were they there, though how little were they aware of it, to teach, to
enlighten, to admonish! With them came the Halsted or Spencer or Portor
imperiousness or graciousness or brains; the Halsted eyes, which were
beautiful, and the Halsted tempers, which were not; with them came
those obstinate egotisms, those devotions and ideals, those headstrong
weaknesses, those gentle fortitudes which, strong in themselves,
survived vividly from generation to generation.
My aunt Henrietta, my aunt Sarah and the rest, it was plain to be
seen, were the earthly abodes of strong antecedent family spirits;
and now, these bodily abodes doomed to decay, had not those spirits,
strong and nimble, already begun to frequent the available lives of
the younger generation, resolved on living yet in the day-lighted
world, and visiting still the glimpses of the moon; hopeful, perhaps,
in the younger generation, to correct some old folly; or willful,
and determined, it might be, to pursue in some younger life the old
fatality and mistakes?
This was what it meant, this and not less, when, often a little
wistfully, the passing generation remarked certain likenesses. "Mary,
how _much_ she is getting to be like William!" or, "Do you know, she
reminds me of her great-grandmother Ferguson"; or, "She has the Portor
eyes"; and sometimes, cryptically, so that I might not guess too
clearly what it meant, "Very like the Halsteds."
All those things were, I believe, far more influential and educative
than the unthinking will admit. They gave me much food for thought.
They roused in me commendable emotions, or salutary dismays. Might I
some day be like my aunt Sarah? Was I really like my father? Could
I worthily be classed with these others? And traits not to be proud
of--was I in danger from these? So cautions and hopes and worthinesses
grew up in me under the fine influence of what might be called a
study in "Comparative Characteristics." There is not alone a dignity,
but a tenderness as well, lent to life by such a study of former and
passing generations. The results of living much of my childhood in
the presence of the past, serving tea to it, offering it the required
courtesies, putting footstools under its feet, were, I believe, a
certain abiding reverence for human nobility, and a pity for human
faults and weaknesses, and more, a desire and hope for nobility in
myself, and a haunting dread that some family weakness might reappear
in me; and these, as valuable assets to education, I would not rank
below the dates of the battles of Crécy and Poitiers, and the siege of
Paris--none of which dates, though I once learned them carefully, have
remained with me.
There is not space to tell of that nearer constellation of warm and
bright stars, guests who were my mother's and father's intimate friends
and contemporaries. Even if there were nothing else to recommend them,
these were men and women who had lived through the Civil War in their
prime. To sit on the knee of my ex-soldier uncle, and know that where
my head leaned he carried in his breast-pocket a little Testament, with
a bullet-hole in it but not quite through it--the Testament having
saved his life and stopped the bullet from reaching his heart; and to
sit on the knee of another uncle, who actually carried a bullet from
Antietam about in his body, yes, and for all that, was the very gayest
of the gay--these experiences were spelling-books of a higher order and
readings in life not to be looked down on.
There were other uncles, who visited the house only in tradition, but
were entertained there how warmly of my eager fancy,--their adventurous
lives having ended before mine began,--who were memorable lessons in
daring, in courtesy, and in spirit!
There was my uncle Robert, for instance, who, to escape, for his part,
from my Chancellor grandfather's stern requirement that all of his
seven sons should study law, ran away and went before the mast at
eighteen, and at twenty-one came sailing home again, master of his own
vessel.
She was called the Griffin. Ah, the Griffin! the Griffin! Though I
never set foot upon her deck, how well I knew her, masts, spars,
canvas, tar, and timber! How often I had stood in dreams, a little
figure at the prow, my skirts and hair blown back by the wind, while
we sailed the seas, she and I and her gallant crew, under the wise
direction of my sailor uncle! How often had we sought and found, across
the pathless ways, those places, vague, vague and far away, but known
and endeared to me by the wonder and the romance of their names--China
and Celebes, Madagascar and Gibraltar, the Azores and Canaries and
Shetlands, Hebrides, Bermudas and the Spice Islands, Ceylon and the
Andamans, Marseilles and Archangel and Valparaiso! How possible all of
them were, how sure of access, without regard to limiting geography!
Let but the Griffin weigh her anchor, and her sails be set! How far!
how far!
Never mind that the Griffin's master was dead and buried in the sea he
loved, before I was born! I contrived to live above these facts, as I
did above geography. Could it be possible, do you think, that this my
best-loved uncle did not know me when I knew him so well? Was I not,
somehow and notwithstanding, one of his close kith and kin, on whom he
looked fondly? His favorite niece, perhaps with a spirit of adventure
to match his own?
There were other uncles besides, with lives full as romantic. I mention
only this one, because I loved him best.
There was, further, my mother's youngest sister, who was better
than any legend. I would rather have inherited, as I did then, that
love-story of hers, than very considerable worldly riches.
Another of my mother's sisters was mistress of a home on Fifth Avenue
and of a very lovely country place on the Hudson. She had maids at
every hand to wait upon her, and footmen whose eyes looked straight
ahead of them, and who wore cockades in their hats. I liked her for
herself: her beauty and her spirit and commandingness always stirred
me, and she liked and approved of me, besides. Moreover,--let me be
frank,--I liked her too, in those days, for the footmen as well. One
of my sisters had visited her for nine months, and had, on her return,
entirely revolutionized all my ideas of the world.
But that, rather, which confirmed and stablished me and my ideals as on
a rock, was the love-story of my youngest aunt.
She and her husband had only the most moderate means. They lived in
what I like now to believe must have been a rose-covered cottage. But
oh, the love of them! She had a mass of wonderful hair which it seems
he loved to unpin at night, to see it fall at either side of her lovely
face, down to her knees and beyond; and a tiny foot, whose slipper he
would allow no one but himself to put on. All reports of every member
of the family agreed: these were a pair of perfect lovers; like "Rose
in Bloom" and "Ansal Wajoud"; no harsh word was ever spoken between
them; they lived wholly for each other, in a blissful world apart, rich
in their own manner; where neither poverty, nor distress, nor discord
could find them; and where no hand could ever fall upon the latch to
bring them sorrow--save only one.
That hand fell--the hand of him gently termed by Scheherazade and other
tale-tellers of the East, "The Terminator of Delights, and Separator of
Companions."
She came to be with us the winter that she was widowed. It was thought
the change of air, and perhaps the brightness of our household,
might be of some little help. We children were admonished to be very
gentle--not to be noisy. Superfluous precaution! She was to me sacred!
She used to walk up and down the upper veranda, taking the air
slenderly, a light shawl about her shoulders, her tiny foot pausing now
and then for greater steadiness, when the wind swayed her frail body
too rudely. I have known many faces since then; I never knew one with
a lovelier look. Heartbroken though she was, the depth of her love was
daily attested, for there never came complaint or bitter word across
her lips; and you went to her, without question, for quiet and comfort,
as to a sanctuary.
At first, it seems, she had been pitifully rebellious, had longed and
prayed to die (we children knew these facts); but, having been denied
so much as this, she rose delicately, and lived on worthy of him,
binding and unbinding her hair, fastening her little slippers anew for
the daily road and routine of life. Sometimes, with tactful or tactless
devotion (I do not know to this day which), I would offer to fasten
them for her; and she would smile and let me do it, and usually kissed
me afterward.
There were years and years when I never saw her. She grew more frail, I
am told, and her cheek withered; but to me she was always incomparable,
and always "Rose-in-Bloom"; and like Rose-in-Bloom, looking always to
one thing only--reunion with her beloved.
"Will fortune, after separation and distance, grant me union with
my beloved?" sighs the lover of Rose-in-Bloom. "Close the book
of estrangement and efface my trouble? Shall my beloved be my
cup-companion once more? Where is Rose-in-Bloom, O King of the Age?"
It might have been her lover who so questioned a mightier king, while
she waited far from him, there even in our very house. And the reply of
the king in the story would still have been fitting: "By Allah, ye are
two sincere lovers; and in the heaven of beauty two shining stars, and
your case is wonderful and your affair extraordinary."
* * * * *
It were indeed impossible to explain all that these, the vivid lives of
my own, meant to me, and what effect they had on what I like to call
my education--how much indeed they were my education.
It is usually assumed that, the sooner we get at books, the sooner we
shall become educated. I think it a pale assumption. The order might
more happily be reversed. I am convinced that it was mainly by my
reading of these men and women, with whom the world of my childhood was
peopled and whom the gracious habit of visiting brought within my ken,
that I came later to recognize and enjoy the best authors and the best
literature. I had known Lear and Othello and Hamlet in my own circle,
though without Shakespearean dramatization or language. I have already
told you how well I knew "Rose-in-Bloom," so much better than the
"Arabian Nights" could ever tell me of her. "The poet's eye in a fine
frenzy rolling" was familiar enough to me. I had had it rolled on me by
the author of "Herod and Mariamne." I was continually recognizing in
books fragments of life, but glorified by the art of phrase or symbol.
When I came one day upon the incomparable scene in Capulet's orchard,
and those lines,--
"By yonder blessed moon I swear,
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops,"
was I, do you think, a stranger to it? Had I not in real life heard
Miss Lou Brooks sing with a full heart and a quivering voice,--
"The stars shine o'er his pathway!"
It will, without doubt, be objected that my childhood was an
exceptional one, even for my day; that the average child of the present
would certainly have no such characters and types from which to draw
knowledge. But this is, I am sure, a false premise. Humanity is a
very ancient stuff, and human beings are to be found to-day quite as
interesting and vivid as ever human beings were. But there lacks to the
modern child the quiet opportunity for knowing and studying humanity
at first-hand. In place of long and comfortable and constant visits,
we have a kind of motion-picture hospitality soon over, a film on a
roll soon spun out; and instead of life with its slower actions and
reactions, a startling mere picture of life flashing by.
A short time ago I watched a party of married people and children
receive an automobileful of guests at a country house. The guests
remained something over twelve hours, which is a long visit in these
days.
When they came, it was explained by them how many miles they had come
that day and over what roads. An hour was now devoted to getting the
dust off and to a change of clothes. After this there was much chatter
among host and guests, talk of mutual friends, and much detail as to
journeying; what roads had been found good, what ones uncomfortable for
speeding, with a comparing of road-maps among the men. Then there was
luncheon; after that, siestas; after these, a spin to the polo grounds
in the host's "auto"; after this, tea on the country-club veranda,
and another spin home. Another half-hour was now again given to the
removal of dust, then an hour to an exceptionally well-served supper;
more chatter, with rather high laughter; then the summoning of the
original "auto"; good-byes, some waving of hands, a little preliminary
chugging of the machine; then a speeding away, a vanished thing. Gone
in a flash! A clean sheet once more! The moving-picture visit was over;
the host and hostess returned to the chairs on their own veranda; the
handsome, long-legged bronzed children looked bored; and the _lares_
and _penates_ inside, if there were any, shivered, I am sure, with what
"freezings" in the midst of "old December's bareness everywhere."